The incoming Donald Trump administration’s promised shakeup of the nation’s education system, including the dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education, with the nomination of Linda McMahon as DOE Secretary, presents the opportunity to address decades of increasingly dismal outcomes.

Among the areas of concern are astonishingly low scores registered by U.S. students in reading, writing, and mathematics proficiency. 

Just 19% of high school seniors graduating are functionally illiterate.

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Some have pointed to the politicization of the classroom as a related problem, if not one cause. “Woke” ideology taking root in classrooms has led to showdowns between parents and school boards in the country’s overall fractious climate, adding insult to injury as America watched outcomes suffer. All the while, grades are inflated and literacy and math skills tanked. What are students learning, exactly?

The prioritization of political lightning rods such as race or gender in the classroom cannot have helped. But is the rise of so-called woke ideology solely to blame for plummeting educational achievement?

It’s difficult to isolate the variable in the smartphone era; technology and its use has its role. Addiction to devices has obvious and negative effects on education outcomes. 

Banning smartphones in the classroom may help curb student distraction and anxiety, but one study found it was students’ cognitive skills themselves negatively impacted by greater smartphone use. 

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But the Biden-Harris administration’s open border policy, and historical trends since Ronald Reagan’s Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, may contribute to the decline of literacy and math skills, college readiness, and overall efficacy of education in the United States through the transformation of the makeup of the classroom. 

By 2021, education spending had increased 136% since the DOE’s establishment under the Jimmy Carter administration, and the number of students in the U.S. education system also increased, but only by about 9% with historical rises and falls in the intervening years. In 1977, there were roughly 46.5 million school aged children in the United States. Today there are 49.6 million.

As of 2023, about 26%, or more than a quarter of the children in U.S. households, came from immigrant households, double the share of children from immigrant households in 1990.

By 2021, there were a stunning 5.3 million English learners in U.S. public schools, or about one in nine of the United States’ roughly 45 million enrolled that year, who were learning to speak English in school.

According to a 2020 paper by the National Education Association, by 2025, one out of four students in the classroom was expected to be an English language learner. Some states, such as New York and California bear a greater bulk of the burden of educating a student body that cannot speak English, but few districts are left untouched. 

According to the Ohio Department of Workforce and Education, Ohio is educating nearly 70,000 students who are English learners. Seventy percent of Ohio school districts had seen a rise in students who didn’t speak English this year. Pennsylvania schools, such as in Charleroi, which saw a similar tide of Haitian migrants as Springfield, Ohio, have incurred a huge financial burden hiring ESL teachers to keep up. 

While learning English at some point in a students’ education doesn’t necessarily equate to lower literacy outcomes at graduation, it is hard to figure how it would help overall outcomes — and avoid consuming major staffing resources and transforming the classroom experience for children. 

Democrats’ grip on political patronage for educators is a factor. As a political bloc, teachers and teachers unions’ overwhelmingly supported Democrats in this election: the largest teachers’ union endorsed Kamala Harris and every single dollar of campaign money and lobbying from teachers unions’ went to Democrats and left-leaning groups.  

The incoming Trump administration’s plans to close the border and carry out mass deportation operations may alleviate schools’ burden somewhat, but the effects of educating a completely different student body — increasingly learning English for the first time — may last for generations.